Extract Text from PDF
Pull all selectable text out of a PDF into copyable plain text, page by page.
About This Tool & Technical Logic
Extracts the embedded text layer from every page — the text you can select in a viewer — into clean plain text with page markers. Text-layer extraction is exact: fonts, layout order, and Unicode (accents, CJK) are preserved.
Scanned PDFs have no text layer (they're images of text) and return empty pages — that requires OCR, which needs server-scale models. Rule of thumb: if you can select it in a viewer, this tool extracts it.
PDF.js getTextContent() per page → items joined with position-aware line breaks.
How to Use — Step by Step
- 1
Load the PDF
A progress bar covers per-page extraction on large documents.
- 2
Copy or download the text
Output includes ==== Page N ==== markers so citations stay traceable.
- 3
Clean up as needed
Run the result through our case converter, duplicate remover, or email extractor for further processing.
Frequently Asked Questions
The PDF is a scan — image-only. Test: try selecting text in any PDF viewer; if you can't, there's no text layer to extract.